Breaking History - When Trade Wars Become Real Wars

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

It’s been two weeks since President Donald Trump declared war on the global economic system his predecessors painstakingly built up since 1945. Then he partially reversed course, paused most of the tariffs, and focused on China. In this episode, we dive into the last time the world’s most populous country was in a trade war with the world’s richest country. What do the British Empire’s Opium Wars of the 1800s tell us about America’s pending economic divorce with China? Go to groundnews.com/BreakingHistory to get 40% off the unlimited access Vantage plan and stay fully informed on today’s biggest news stories. Buy tickets for the first SAPIR Debate: “Is Donald Trump Good for the Jews?” at  sapirjournal.org/sapirdebate. Producers: Alex Miller, Poppy Damon and Bobby Moriarty Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's been two weeks since President Donald Trump declared war on the global economic system that his predecessors painstakingly built up since 1945. Then he partially reversed course, paused most of the tariffs, and focused on China. In this episode, I dive into the last time the world's most populous country was in a trade war with the world's richest. Up next, what the British Empire's opium wars tells us about America's pending economic divorce with China. Sapir, the quarterly journal edited by Brett Stevens devoted to ideas for a thriving Jewish future is proud to announce the Sapir Debates, a public debate series on the most consequential issues facing Jewish communities in the U.S., Israel, and around the world. Presented in partnership with the 92nd Street Y, the Sapir Debates will be hosted and moderated

by Brett Stevens and feature world-class thinkers. The topics of the inaugural Sapir Debate to be held on the evening of May 15th at the 92nd Street Y will be, Is Donald Trump Good for the Jews?, featuring Jason Greenblatt, Trump's former special envoy to the Middle East, arguing for, and Rahm Emanuel, former mayor of Chicago, chief of staff to Barack Obama, arguing against. Watch them duke it out at the 92nd Street Y on May 15th. You can purchase tickets for the inaugural Sapir Debate at sapirjournal.org forward slash debate. That's sapirjournal.org forward slash debate.

It's official. China and America are in a trade war. And the day that we began to make America wealthy again. Happy belated liberation day. What a rush that was. Two weeks ago, Donald Trump decided to implode the stock market, tariffing every nation with the economic precision of a coyote Tommy gunning a world map. We tariffed friends, we tariffed enemies, we tariffed uninhabited islands. This shining city tariffed the living shit out of the hill.

And for a week, we were told by the Trump administration to pull up our big boy pants and embrace this vast disappearance of wealth as a dose of necessary short-term medicine. U.S. stocks are tumbling. Stocks plunged again Friday. Data shows a nearly $11 trillion, trillion dollar drop in the value of the stock market. Recessionary environment. One of the dumbest decisions he's ever made as president, and that is saying the whole lot.

Then just as quickly, the president backed off and announced a pause on all the other tariffs with one exception. China. The markets rallied. China China China China China China China China China China. I have great respect for China, but they can't do this. China. China. China. China. China. China. China.

China. China. China. China. China. China. China. China.

China. China. China. China. China. China. China. China.

China. China. China. China's more focused now. And maybe that was the plan. Maybe it was always about China. Either way, it is now. America and China are at war. We're just using numbers instead of bullets. This state of affairs is a very big deal. Because for the last 40 or so years,

the American and Chinese economies have become integrated. Chinese workers make our T-shirts and our iPhones and then watch our superhero movies on the weekend. China's banks purchase our debt and Chinese billionaires fund our universities and think tanks. Now this era of Chimerica is coming to a close. Additional tariffs on Chinese goods

are in place effective midnight tonight. China is digging in. Americans are waking up to a whole new escalation in the global trade war. The Chinese are still warning they'll fight this to the end. But will this trade war lead to a real war? It's hard to say. China is certainly flexing its muscles. Just this month, its military began live fire exercises off the coast of Taiwan, a territory

China covets and that America has been arming for more than 50 years. When our economies were intertwined, there was a strong disincentive for outright war. But what about now? So how could a trade war spin so far out of control? Well, for most Americans, one very obvious example stands out. Star Wars. You may remember Luke and Leia and Darth Vader, but the real reason that the Galactic Empire was a war with everyone was thanks to a trade war.

If memory serves, it was something about interstellar shipping. But beyond George Lucas's imagination, what dangers lurk within a trade war? Peace through trade was one of the foundational principles of neoliberalism. An internationalized market would reduce the possibility of war as everyone had a vested interest in and a reliance on doing business with other countries around the world. This was the argument set out in the Lexus and the Olive Tree by the neoliberalism goat, Thomas Friedman. He eventually simplified it in 1996 in the pages of the New York Times by writing, The thesis is this. No two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other. But that was 1996. One year on in 1997, McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other. But that was 1996. One year on in 1997, McDonald's had a big year.

First, they invented the McFlurry. And second, they opened a branch in Kiev, Ukraine. Decades later, when Vladimir Putin's Russian army invaded Ukraine, it would have been quite possible for a Russian soldier to pick up a Big Mac from a McDonald's in Kursk, ride a tank across the border, and order an Oreo McFlurry for dessert. So much for the McDonald's peace theory. Well, this is not the first trade war between the West and China, long before it was ruled by the Communist Party.

A trade dispute pitted the most powerful empire in the West with a declining but powerful empire in the West with a declining but powerful empire in the East. We know that conflict today as the Opium Wars. After the break, what happened the last time China got into a trade war with the richest country in the world? I'm out there all the way And Can I dance key? My tarot will amaze In place you gotta raise Those prices on the rise

My promises are lies Oh man I wanna cry Happy liberation day Happy liberation day There are few countries in history that can compare to the power that Trump inherited when he became the American president for a second time. There was Rome, of course. The Mongols had a go. Spain and Russia had their moments, too. But it was Great Britain, the last of the great imperial nations, whose global control most recently resembles the America that

I grew up in. Sure, we don't own a quarter of the planet, as the British once did, but America is nonetheless the closest thing the world has to the Empire today, a superpower fueled by global trade. And so it's worth remembering that all empires will rise and fall, as Nobel laureate Doris Lessing once put it. When I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires. Now if we're looking for a trade war that got out of hand, thrusting mighty powers into conflict, then we should look at the British Empire. In the 18th century, Britain was so powerful that the Revolution of the American Colonies in 1776 was a significant but withstandable setback.

This tiny country floating at arms length from Europe had mastered shipbuilding and early economics to such an extent that by the end of the 1700s it was the world's preeminent naval power, as fancy men in powdered wigs presumably remarked to their nanny over marmalade crumpets. The sun never sets on the British Empire. This cliché was true. England owned the provinces of Canada, the British West Indies, not to mention the prize, India.

The empire was so vast that they even had a whole continent to ship their felons to, Australia. On the other side of the planet though, there was another empire. China. England's history can often make Americans feel nouveau riche, but compared to China, the British traditions and royal family look about as historic as a Harry Potter lunchbox. China was considered a land of wonder and awe. For Europeans with memories of pointless religious wars and holy crusades, the stability of China looked almost like a model to aspire towards. The British-Chinese relationship began in the 17th century at the dawn of

the Qing Empire. The Chinese had introduced the British to tea and the Brits had quickly rearranged their afternoons around drinking the stuff. Tea became a British institution and a staple of its economy. Britain saw China as a fellow empire. Its Manchu emperor, Qin Long, ruled from 1736 to 1799, 63 years, the longest reign of any Chinese emperor in the entire country's history. And this was something of a golden era. China's population and wealth boomed. No less an enlightenment icon as Voltaire praised Confucius, the godfather of

China's governing philosophy and legal system. But China was not racing into the future as the European powers were so desperate to do. Here is how Adam Smith in 1776 described China in his classic on free markets, the wealth of nations. China has been long one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous countries in the world.

It seems, however, to have long been stationary. Marco Polo, who visited it more than 500 years ago, describes its cultivation, industry, and populace-ness almost in the same terms in which they are described by travelers in the present times. It had, perhaps, even long before his time, acquired that full complement of riches which the nature of its laws and institutions permit it to acquire.

The accounts of all travelers, inconsistent in many other respects, agree in the low wages of labor and in the difficulty which a laborer finds in bringing up a family in China. Smith would go on to say that China may be stationary, but it hadn't gone backwards. He was impressed that a country with so many people was governed so well. All that said, China was really a mystery. Most European observers like Smith didn't know much about the country

other than the tea, porcelain, silk, and jade imported from this vast empire on the other side of the world. The mystery was intentional. Emperor Qin Long projected strength through isolation. The emperor up in Beijing, this was the Qin Long emperor at the time, tried to keep foreign trade at a distance and he tried to keep it very, very tightly regulated. This is historian and University of Massachusetts professor Stephen Platt. So the one port of Canton far away from the capital.

And within that port, the British weren't even allowed to go into the city itself. Canton at the time was one of the largest cities in the world. It was a huge trading entrepôt for South China. The British and the Americans and others had to make do with this really tiny little compound down by a smelly river. The whole compound was about 200 yards by 300 yards, and it had buildings for the foreigners to live in and little warehouses for them. They were sort of built in a European style for the foreigners who were living in them, these sort of granite and marble buildings. But for the foreign traders,

this was their entire world when they were trading with China. During the trading season, they were at their compound in Canton. It was more that they dreamed of an expansion of trade and they dreamed of being able to reach much further into Chinese markets. The British Empire was desperate to get into China. Why? Well, it's just so big. It's the same reason that in 1972, President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger,

opened relations with China as well. And the American businesses that sought Chinese labor in Chinese markets were willing to live with the corruption, theft of intellectual property and economic coercion because the trade was worth it. And that's the same reason that 40 years later, by the way, Hollywood began editing pro-Chinese sentiment into films like 2012 and The Martian

to suck up to the Chinese government because the potential audience in China dwarfed any other. And guess what? It was kind of the same way back in the 1700s. China was far too tempting a market to leave untouched. And fortunately for the British Empire, they had just the right entity to go ahead and touch it. Based in London, the East India Company was in some ways the world's first international

corporation and looked after all British trade with China. But they had a problem. They were only allowed to trade at one port, in Canton, where they would exchange precious silver for tea. They wanted to exchange wool instead, but Canton had a tropical climate and no need for heavy coats. What the British needed was access to cold weather ports further up the coast, where there might be a market for winter clothing and blankets. Hoping to change this, in 1759, the East India Company sent the only man in the British Empire who actually spoke Chinese. His name was James Flint, and he went on a mission to Beijing in the hopes of securing

an audience with Emperor Qinglong himself. Well, it didn't go well. Flint was imprisoned for three years for having the audacity to even enter mainland China, but he got off lightly. What really galled the Emperor was the fact that a European had learned Mandarin. So the authorities found Flint's teacher and had him beheaded. For the next 34 years, the East India Company and their traders learned their lesson. But London still dreamt of more access to the Chinese market. So in 1793, King George III got

involved and sent Lord George McCartney to Beijing in the hopes of accomplishing what James Flint did not. McCartney carried a letter to the emperor placed in a box encrusted with jewels. It read in part, To the supreme emperor of China, worthy to live tens of thousands and tens of thousands, thousand years. Our art and wish has been to become acquainted with the celebrated institutions of Your Majesty's populous and extensive empire, which have

carried its prosperity to such a height as to be the admiration of all surrounding nations. McCartney's mission to China was enormous. He brought his own marching band. There were servants, sailors, secretaries, and other officials. McCartney brought an entourage of hundreds in the hopes of opening relations with the Qing dynasty. They send Lord McCartney with two huge ships filled with 600 crates of gifts for the emperor.

This is Stephen Platt again. The goal of this for McCartney is to try to impress the Emperor of China with the ingenuity of the British. And so they bring you know all sorts of cutting-edge scientific instruments, they bring artists, they bring this planetarium that you know filled an entire room and was thought to be the greatest mechanism ever created by human hands. McCartney was asking for an embassy and normal trade relations. In return, Britain would share their latest tech, telescopes, diving bells, and other

gadgets. But the diplomatic mission was not prepared for what was about to happen. And let's stress this again. Nobody in England really knows anything about China. None of them even spoke Mandarin. China was still very much a black box. In one of my favorite anecdotes in Platt's great history of this period, Imperial Twilight, he recounts how there is a long negotiation between McCartney and emissaries of the emperor

about the kowtow, a ritual where a guest of the emperor kneels on both knees and bows nine times. McCartney was not gonna do that. First, he offered to kowtow if the emperor would do the same in front of a portrait of King George, but of course that would be a non-starter. Instead, McCartney offered to kneel on one knee and bow his head as he would for his own king. Now the compromise was accepted, but Emperor Qinglong was offended.

The British hoped to dazzle the emperor with their innovative science and engineering. In a pavilion outside of Beijing, McCartney's retinue assembled a massive planetarium. He had brought along the inventor and astronomer, James Dinwiddie, who had planned to launch the very first hot air balloon in China, which he himself would personally pilot. Maybe witnessing man-powered flight would be enough to impress even a mighty Chinese emperor? And yet, when Qin Long finally arrived at the exhibition, he examined the telescopes and other lenses, remarking,

Good enough to amuse children. And then he left. In a few days, he ordered the entire British entourage to pack up and leave Beijing. McCartney's mission to China was a dud. In a final kiss-off, the Qin Long Emperor wrote to King George III, As the greatest splendor of the Chinese empire has spread its fangs far and wide, George III. What is it that we can't want here? Strange or costly objects do not interest me. We possess all things.

I set no value on objects strange or ingenious and have no use for your country's manufacturers. After the break, the East India Company discovers an ingenious way to balance their trade deficit with China. A damsel with a dulcimer in a vision once I saw. It was an Abyssinian maid, and on her dulcimer she played, singing of Mount Abera. Could I revive within me her symphony and song, To such a deep delight would win me, That with music loud and long I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome, those caves of ice, That all who heard should see them there, and all should cry, Beware, beware, his flashing eyes, his floating hair. Weave a circle round him thrice, and close your eyes with holy dread.

For he on honey dew hath fed, and drunk the milk of paradise." Those were the last stanzas of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan, named for the Mongol ruler and conqueror of China. I've always liked this poem because it's really about a dream world. A dream made possible by what he called that milk of paradise, opium. Coleridge, like the jazz musicians and beat poets of the mid-20th century, was an addict. He became addicted to opium after suffering from rheumatic fever as a young man. He initially took something called laudanum, a mixture of opium powder and wine, for the pain and graduated

over time to smoking it. Coleridge was not a unique case. All around the world, international trade was introducing people to the pleasures of opium. It was the opium trade which gave the British the chance to make inroads into China in a way that it hadn't before. And this trade would eventually explode into war, changing the path for China for a century. Opium comes from the poppy plant. It can be grown all over South and East Asia, but in the 19th and 18th century, it was primarily cultivated in India and Turkey. Poppies yield little green pods when they ripen, and if you cut those pods open at the right moment, a white viscous liquid oozes out. That paste was then dried and cured, wrapped in leaves or

parchment and then packed in chests and loaded onto ships. Just like Britain, China was also interested in opium. There were plenty of Chinese coal-rages, wealthy, educated, inquisitive people looking for a new high. And these elites wanted the best stuff. China did grow some opium, but that was the cheap stuff. Like any product, consumers of opium understood there were tiers of quality. And the best opium in the world came from Calcutta, India. It even had its own brand name, Patna. By the beginning of the 1800s, Calcutta opium was a sought after luxury, like aged scotch or the fine Colombian cocaine of Steely Dan's immortal Hay-19.

Patna was the good shit. Patna was Walter White's blue meth in Breaking Bad. I know all about your operation. My partners here tell me that you produce a meth that's 70% pure, if you're lucky. What I produce is 99.1% pure. Yours is just some tepid, off-brand, generic cola. What I'm making is classic Coke. All right.

making is classic coke. All right. OK. So if we just waste you right here, right now, and leave you in the desert, then there is no more coke on the market, right? See how that works? Only us. Do you really want to live in a world without Coca-Cola?

The fact that Patna was so in demand in China, the most populous nation on earth, was very good news for the British East India Company. They controlled Calcutta and they cornered the market in Patna. But there was a catch. The Chinese emperor banned opium in 1729. The company didn't want to risk their legitimate business in the territory by mixing up their shipments with contraband. So they found a workaround.

They became wholesalers, auctioning off chestloads of Patna opium to ambitious traders in Bombay and Calcutta, who would then sail the drugs to Linton Island, about 20 miles offshore from Canton, China. The local Chinese officials were easily bribed and looked the other way as the ships unloaded the chests of opium to local Chinese smugglers. The smugglers themselves would ferry the opium to the mainland in long narrow boats known as fast crabs because they could outrun the empire's coast guard. And the best part of all?

The whole trade was tax free. Everyone was making money. In 1800, the company was shipping around 4,000 chests of opium to China a year, and that would fetch between 400,000 and 800,000 pounds sterling. Over the next 20 years, the exports would more than double, at 10,000 chests per year, peaking in the late 1830s at 40,000 chests, netting between 6 and 8 million pounds sterling. Britain was filling its pockets through the pain of Chinese opium addiction.

The good times, though, for the UK at least, would not last. By 1830, China's Emperor Daozhuang was becoming increasingly agitated with the opium problem in his country. The main thing is it's spreading through the official bureaucracy. Here is Stephen Platt again. These corrupt bureaucratic officials, especially their secretaries, like any given official would have this army of secretaries under him. And they became notorious opium smokers. The officials who were supposed to be tasked with policing this illegal traffic took huge bribes themselves and these soldiers who were in units that were supposed to be policing the coast and preventing the smuggling of opium, you know, lo and

behold here they are they've all become addicted to opium because they're given cheap drug. The spread of opium among elites is not the only problem for China. The opium trade also reversed that old trade deficit. Now silver was not flowing into China, it was flowing into the coffers of the East India Company because the Chinese smugglers paid for the drugs in silver and none of it was taxed. By the 1830s, the opium epidemic in China was not just a moral problem, it was an economic crisis. The other problem, which is even more widespread, is that because so much silver has been going out of the country, the price of silver has been skyrocketing within China.

And since taxes are assessed as a fixed amount of silver that each district has to hand up, and peasants have to take whatever copper currency they have and hand over enough to buy a certain amount of silver for their taxes, it effectively means that taxes go up everywhere. And you can have peasants in a village who they themselves don't smoke opium or take part in the trade. They have nothing to do with it. They've never seen a foreigner before, but their taxes have gone up, you know, 50 or 60%. And so you start getting tax riots and the threat of social instability.

And that's where the emperor ultimately decides to crack down on the trade. Now, this part is absolutely fascinating. Initially, there were two factions within the court of Emperor Daozhong. There were legalizers who counseled the emperor to tolerate the opium trade and tax it, thus solving the trade deficit, and then they could focus on treating the addicts. And then there were the hardliners, who were calling for an outright ban.

Emperor Daozhong went with the hardliners, launching, in some ways, you could say, the first war on drugs. And the man he deputized to do it was perhaps the last honest man in China, the one incorruptible official, a judge and governor named Lin Zhizhu. His Chinese nickname was Lin, clear as heaven. He is still a legendary figure. There is a statue of Lin Zhizhu in New York Chinatown, which has a plaque on it that says pioneer of the war on drugs.

Lin Zexu is sort of the famously incorruptible Confucian official who ultimately took on the British and the opium trade. He shows up at Canton at the beginning of 1839 with a mandate from the emperor. It's not just a mandate from the emperor. He is an imperial commissioner, which gives him the mandate from the emperor. It's not just a mandate from the emperor. He is an imperial commissioner, which gives him the powers of the emperor. He comes to Canton and he has power over all of the civil and military officials in South China basically. He immediately cracks down on the trade.

He starts by cracking down on the Chinese side and rounds up dealers and corrupt officials. Then he turns his sights on the British in that little compound of buildings outside Kenton, and he surrounds the compound with troops and orders that the British have to surrender all of their opium stocks immediately, and then they have to sign pledges agreeing that if they ever bring opium to China again, they agree to be executed. At this point in the story, we have to introduce another character, Charles Elliot. Charles Elliot came from a prestigious family in England. His cousin was the governor of India at one point.

And by 1836, Elliot was in charge of all British trade in Canton. In March 1839, Elliot watched as Lin Zizhou cracked down on the opium trade and effectively held the entire British trading community hostage in Canton. All trade would stop unless the smugglers handed over their opium stocks to Lin Zizhou. Unless Eliot did something, the trade of tea, silk, and porcelain would stop altogether, a disaster for the empire and also, silk, and porcelain, would stop altogether, a disaster for the empire and also, I might add, for his career. Now, I have to explain something here.

In an era before the Telegraph, Eliot could not wait for instructions from London. And so he improvised. He told the opium dealers to hand over their drugs to Lin Zixu, and in exchange, he promised that Her Majesty's government would compensate them at fair market value. Sounds good, right? Crisis averted! Lindsay Zhu gets the boast of the largest drug seizure in the history of everything, and the legitimate trade routes would then reopen.

But the plan did not go smoothly. Lindsay Zhu pressed his advantage. Elliott thought that after he promised to hand over the opium, the siege of the British compound would end, but Lin didn't take Eliot at his word and instead announced that he would not lift the siege until at least three quarters of that precious patna was in his possession. This would take months. Eliot, who had hoped to de-escalate tensions, was now thoroughly freaked out. At this point, Eliot began sending urgent messages back to London requesting backup

from the world's greatest navy. This was definitely an escalation. Even after Lin Zizhou had the opium destroyed and ended the siege, the standoff worsened. Eliot didn't trust Lin. So he ordered everyone in the British compound to pack up and move to Macau, another designated trading zone the Chinese created for the Portuguese Empire that Elliot believed was out of Lin's jurisdiction. Well, he was wrong about that.

In a terrible twist, just outside of Macau, a few British sailors got into a bar fight killing a Chinese national. Lynn demanded that Elliot turn them over to the authorities. Elliot refuses. In response, Lynn sent Chinese warships up to Macau, ordered Chinese servants to end their work for British subjects and banned British ships from the city's harbors. Rumors even spread that the freshwater supply for the British ships had been poisoned. Elliot ordered an evacuation of Macau to the sparsely populated island known at the time as Hong Kong. Lin got wind of this and ordered the people of Hong Kong to arm themselves

and prepare for war against British invaders. Then, on September 4, 1839, three merchant ships under Eliot's command fired on a fleet of Chinese warships. This would go down as the first battle of the First Opium War. The pain doesn't end there for Eliot. Remember that he told that fleet of drug dealers to hand over their opium? Well, now he had the unenviable task of telling the Foreign Minister, the famous Lord Palmerston, that Britain owed these smugglers about two million British pounds. To get some perspective on that, that's about $360 million today.

Unsurprisingly, no one was thrilled to hear this. Britain was enduring a bit of a fiscal crunch at the time, and Westminster was in no mood to start writing such huge checks. So Palmerston came up with an ingenious idea. He would not only send the naval fleet that Eliot requested, he would also demand that the Chinese pay for the opium that they'd just destroyed. He would not, however, share these diplomatic instructions with Parliament. And this is important. There is a reason why Palmerston was treading very lightly when it came to public opinion. In 1821, England began to wise up about its own opium crisis with the publication of Convessions

of an Opium Eater by Thomas De Quincey. The book remains a classic to this day, a key text for those who romanticize drug use. This is famous British junkie rock star Pete Doherty singing his ode to his hero Thomas De Quincey. Confessions of an opium eater was a publishing phenomenon because De Quincey does not just offer a cautionary tale. He acknowledges in the book that opium gives you a pretty great high. I do not readily believe that any man having once tasted the divine luxuries of opium will

afterwards descend to the gross and mortal enjoyments of alcohol. De Quincey's memoir had a profound effect on British society. Confessions of an opium eater shifted public opinion. No longer was opium considered a minor vice, like gin. It was now seen as a scourge. At the time, the British Empire was fresh from banning slavery and the moral energy from the abolitionist movement carried into the anti-opium movement. Speakers barnstormed throughout England giving speeches

denouncing the poisoning of China. One famous pamphlet from 1835 titled No Opium said that this very simple slogan, quote, must be made as loud and general a watchword as no slavery was, if we would, as a nation, fear God or regard man." This was the backdrop to the Sino-English crisis in London. The breakdown of Chinese and British relations became a huge story. The press began calling it the Opium War, and leading papers like the Times of London blamed the whole affair not on China, but on Palmerston and the government of Lord Melbourne. On April 7, 1840, Member of Parliament James Graham introduced a resolution

to censure Palmerston for endangering British trade with China. You have made war against a mighty empire without declaration, without necessity, without even the shadow of justice." It was entirely our fault, Graham argued. This resolution could have stopped the opium war and forced Palmerston and the other ministers of the government to resign. But there would be a fight. Lord Palmerston was having none of it. He denounced Graham's resolution as a cynical ploy to grab power.

The Chinese held our boys hostage for three months, he reasoned. This war had nothing to do with opium. This was about an arrogant empire taking advantage of us. The Chinese government had thought proper to lay down for itself a rule of action inconsistent with the principles which regulate the intercourse of civilized nations. They have committed acts of violence towards British subjects. They have made war upon them without a declaration of war, and have in fact placed themselves in the wrong. The object of the expedition now fitting out is to obtain reparation for the past and security

for the future. It is the duty of the government to afford protection to British subjects, wherever they may be placed, and to maintain the honor of the British name. One of the opponents of the opium war was the legendary William Gladstone, a future four-time prime minister and probably the most famous man to hail from Liverpool after John Paul, George and Ringo. Gladstone had a very personal reason for despising the opium trade. His sister Helen was an addict.

So when it was time for him to speak, Gladstone pulled no punches. The Chinese government gave you notice to abandon your contraband trade. When they found you would not do so, they had the right to drive you from their coasts on account of your obstinacy in persisting with this infamous and atrocious traffic. Justice, in my opinion, is with them. And whilst they, the pagans, the semi-civilized barbarians, have it on their side, we, the enlightened and civilized Christians, are pursuing objects at variance both with justice and with religion.

A war more unjust in its origin, a war calculated in its progress to cover this country with a permanent disgrace, I do not know and have not read of." I just want to linger on that speech for a moment. The British Parliament is effectively debating a war that had already started. Remember, the fleet is on its way to Canton at this point, and a member of parliament is basically saying, we are the baddies! Remember this episode the next time someone tries to shut down dissent or free speech during a national emergency? In the end, Palmerston prevailed. But barely. Graham's resolution

lost by only nine votes. After the break, how the Opium Wars changed China forever. The British would win the First and the Second Opium Wars. The Chinese military was no match for England's copper-bottomed frigates and warships. Defeats in the consecutive wars and the harsh treaties the Qing emperor was forced to sign marked the beginning of what the Chinese would later call a century of humiliation. As a result of the losses, China ceded Hong Kong to the British Empire. It agreed that British citizens would not be tried in Chinese courts. It finally opened up its cold weather ports to British traders. And the opium epidemic would, of course, continue. The Opium Wars revealed the impressive Chinese Empire to be rotting from the inside. It didn't

help that in between the two Opium Wars, the worst civil war of the 19th century broke out, known as the Taiping Rebellion. The most conservative estimate are that 20 million Chinese people perished in that awful war. The roots of the rot proceeded this period, though. By the end of Qin Long's reign in 1799, the vast imperial bureaucracy had grown so corrupt that his own generals would routinely lie about phantom military successes against battles with rebels in the countryside. Qin Long's broader fear of foreign influence led him to reject a deeper friendship with the British Empire, which at the time was willing to do just about anything to gain access to China's vast market. For an example of what a bad decision this was, take the incident when Emperor Qin Long

dismissed British telescopes as amusements for children. Well, it was in fact those very telescopes that made the accuracy of British cannons deadly to the Chinese inland river forts. Ironically, Emperor Qin Long himself was secretly obsessed with this European gadgetry. He wrote poems about European glass and telescopes. But he was also wary of sharing his wonderment at this technology with his British guests. And he was especially wary of the free market in general when it came to his subjects. Qin Long in some ways reminds me of Donald Trump today.

And while it is by no means a perfect analogy, and of course there are vast differences, the Qing dynasty of this period, a China that stood still but didn't go backwards, as Adam Smith observed, has similarities with America. Consider Qin Long's insistence on treating all foreign visitors as supplicants. Trump does that today. I'm telling you these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are. They are dying to make it here. Please, please sir, make it here.

I'll do anything. I'll do anything, sir. And then there is Qin Long's failure to appreciate the benefits of free trade for his own country. He tells King George that England had nothing that China could possibly covet. But had Ching Long seen the advantage of British trade back in 1793, perhaps his own military would have been better prepared for war in 1839. Donald Trump looks at the world's economic system and only sees how our country has been ripped off. He doesn't see the value of cheap iPhones and sneakers for American consumers, he only

sees Chinese factories stealing American jobs. Dave Chappelle captured Trump's view of free trade well. I'm going to go to China and I'm going to get those jobs from China and bring them back here to America. For what, nigga, so iPhones can be $9,000? Leave that job in China where it belongs. None of us wanna work that hard. The fuck is he thinking?

I wanna wear Nikes. I don't want to make them shit. And yet, here is Trump's Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick literally doing the Chappelle bit earlier this month on CBS's Face the Nation. Remember the army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little little screws to make iPhones. That kind of thing is going to come to America It's going to be automated and great Americans the tradecraft of America is going to fix them is going to work on them They're going to be mechanics. There's going to be HVAC specialists

There's going to be electricians the tradecraft of America our high school educated Americans The core to our workforce is going to have the greatest resurgence of jobs in the history of America to work on these high tech factories which are all coming to America. Now I should say, there is an absolutely fair point to make. That the opening of China, the removal of trade barriers, has devastated what was once a mighty manufacturing base in our country. That is true.

The prosperity of free trade has been very good for the coasts, yet these blessings have not filtered down to the blue collar towns and cities that were once the engine of our economy. That said, it doesn't necessarily follow that the factories that went away during globalization are coming back. So the view in essence thinks you can bring back something like 1968 by just pushing on a single variable and all the rest of the world somehow will fall into place and restore something like those earlier conditions. This is free press columnist and George Mason University economics professor Tyler Cowan but keep in mind right now manufacturing jobs pay less than service sector jobs in the US. So you wanna what bring back jobs that pay less than average.

There's also a long term erosion of jobs in manufacturing and virtually all countries you look at germany they have a massive trade surplus based on exports and manufacturing their number of manufacturing jobs just keeps on falling, falling, falling because of automation. So I just don't see what's the vision of the world where growth in high paying manufacturing jobs in the United States is really a possibility. And then in the meantime, these people you're trying to help, they have to pay higher prices for anything from abroad. China has escaped its century of humiliation. After Mao Zedong consolidated power in the mainland in 1949, slowly but surely this once-mighty

empire has re-emerged on the world stage to menace the economic and security system America created after World War II. Today, China is bankrolling Russia's destruction of Ukraine. It is trying to corner the market in rare earth minerals, the raw material we need to make microchips, semiconductors, and the tech our military needs to fight the next war. China steals our intellectual property. It is a massive counterintelligence risk, its largest telecom company, Huawei, embeds microscopic beacons in its cell phone towers and switches to spy on the communications

between the countries that rely on it. Trump is correct that we need to decouple the supply chains of our most vital industries from China. But the manner in which he is pursuing this divorce is risky. Trade wars don't always lead to real wars, but as the British encounter with the Qing dynasty shows, they very much can. And here is the final twist. Under the Qing dynasty, the British imported opium into China that addicted its elites.

Today it is Chinese factories that produce the deadly opiate fentanyl that cripples and kills the forgotten Americans left behind by globalization. When Lord Palmerston and Charles Eliot first corresponded about the new crackdown on opium by the Qing emperor in the late 1830s, they both agreed that it was not England's responsibility to enforce China's domestic laws. Little did they know that Emperor Dong Zhuo would empower Lin Zizhou to seize British opium and demand the wholesalers be tried in Chinese courts.

Today one can see the Chinese take a similar view of our fentanyl crisis. Why should Beijing concern itself with America's drug problems? Or perhaps the Chinese have long enough memories to believe that our fentanyl problem is a kind of payback to the inheritors of the British Empire. The Opium Wars were a disaster for the Qing Dynasty. It was the beginning of the end. In less than 50 years, China's reputation in Europe would plummet from a splendid empire commanding respect to a paper tiger ripe for exploitation.

As we begin our own trade war with China, I wonder where America is in its own story. Are we a rising power like the British at the end of the 18th century? Or are we like the Qing dynasty, imposing and intimidating to outsiders, but hollowed out and corrupted from within? We really got to say That the world should have to pay For borrowing and spending

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